The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, ‘My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They’re killing each other. They’re killing themselves while we watch them die.’ This is how we came to own these United States. This is the legacy of manifest destiny.

Aaron Huey, a documentary photographer, delivered this line in a public talk accompanying his work on Native American life—most notably his long-term engagement with the Pine Ridge Reservation and the afterlives of U.S. settler colonialism. The quote is framed as a critique of how genocidal projects can culminate not only in direct violence but in conditions that produce internalized harm and social breakdown, which outsiders then cite as evidence of “self-destruction.” Huey uses the language of “manifest destiny” to connect contemporary suffering and public narratives about Indigenous communities to the historical processes of dispossession, forced removal, and structural deprivation that helped consolidate U.S. territorial expansion.

Huey’s statement describes a recurring pattern in colonial and genocidal violence: after long periods of dispossession, forced dependency, and social rupture, the dominant power reframes the resulting internal conflict and self-destruction among the oppressed as evidence of their inherent dysfunction. The “last chapter” is thus not the end of harm but the final rhetorical maneuver—washing one’s hands of responsibility while continuing to benefit from the conditions that were engineered. By linking this mechanism to the United States’ territorial expansion, Huey casts “manifest destiny” not as a neutral national myth but as an ideological cover for conquest whose consequences persist in intergenerational trauma and structural inequality.